Arabella, with music by Richard Strauss to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, returned to the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera this fall in the production directed by Otto Schenk and designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen (sets) and Milena Canonero (costumes), last seen eleven years ago. It was conducted by Nicholas Carter; the revival stage director was Dylan Evans. I saw the performance of November 25.

Arabella’s an opera I’ve always mildly enjoyed, without ever feeling terribly close to it or impelled to dig into in search of hidden treasure. That is also the tone of most of its early reception here, and it has never established more than a tertiary position in the Met’s repertory, or occasioned much excitement elsewhere in the U. S. Yet it has its American enthusiasts. Two of my esteemed colleagues from back in the day, Peter G. Davis and David Hamilton, wrote about it as a work of stature.^(I) Peter called it Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s “most immediately lovable and glowingly human creation,” and David, while noting some flaws, wrote that “the central characters, finely drawn by the librettist, are often eloquently, and always fluently, sustained in the music.” Another, Matthew Gurewitsch, recently spoke feelingly about how “immediate and real” the opening scenes seem to him, with their “deeply emotional” yet “kaleidoscopic” orchestral writing, and though he concedes that one can’t quite make all the pieces of the story add up, he thinks the work should be taken as a “fairy tale”—a characterization the creators themselves employed more than once while working on it. And Patrick J. Smith, in The Tenth Muse, his historical study of the libretto, deemed Hofmannsthal’s for Arabella “. . . the story in which heart and head become one in wisdom and emotion” and is thus “. . . the logical culmination of Hofmannsthal’s librettistic development.” There are informed devotees who prefer Arabella to Der Rosenkavalier. So this time, a little surprised to see it back among the season’s offerings for six performances, I resolved to see if my sympathies could be more intimately engaged. And trying to get a fix on Arabella, and on me in relation to Arabella, has proved to be a little more complicated than anticipated.

“Ort: Wien. Zeit: 1860,” states the score—Vienna, 1860. In their correspondence, composer and librettist talked casually about “the 1860s,” and at one point, more specifically 1866. But 1860 was the final choice. In a July, 1928 exchange about the overall atmosphere and style of the opera, contrasting it with that of Der Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal characterized the time as “. . . more ordinary, less glamorous, more vulgar,” and Strauss called it a “somewhat rotten” era for which he was initially reluctant to write music. Politically and socially, it was a time of liberalization. A constitutional monarchy had been established and Vienna declared its capital, setting in motion the vast project—at least as comprehensive as Baron Haussmann’s contemporaneous one in Paris—to reshape and expand the old city. It was in 1860, in fact, that ground was broken for the Ringstrasse around the path of the now-demolished fortified wall, opening Vienna up  to its suburbs, followed soon by their incorporation into the city, and kicking off the construction boom in grand municipal and imperial buildings, museums, theatres, and residences that was to characterize and delimit the new Vienna. ^(II)So, although the events of 1848 were still vivid in the collective memory and military adventures had recently gone badly, the 1860s were a time of enormous energy and optimism in the city and throughout Austria, which by 1867 had become the western half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the “Dual Monarchy,” with Vienna still the seat of the imperium. Yet for Strauss and Hofmannsthal, it was not a well-remembered time, and their opera seems to not belong to the world of these evidently favorable political and economic developments.